


A Good Idea at the Time

by TigerDragon



Series: Ironclad [4]
Category: Captain - Fandom, Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, F/F, F/M, Multi, always-a-girl!Tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-09 21:59:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1999437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick Fury is dead, SHIELD is compromised and Natasha Romanova is supposed to be dead. So's Steve Rogers. </p><p>HYDRA should have remembered their history - Captain America isn't that easy to kill. And now, not being dead, he has people he can call on. People who are ready to step up and help him take back SHIELD from his enemies. </p><p>Some of those people have power armor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Properly speaking, this story wasn't supposed to happen. 
> 
> When we finished _Palladium Heart_ , we set up an outline for two sequel stories loosely based on _Iron Man 2_ and _3_. As with most good ideas, it's still something we intend to do, but other writing and real-life things have come along and ensured they stayed in the drawer. But after we saw _The Winter Soldier_ for the second time, this story idea dug its way into our brain and wouldn't let go. We tried arguing we didn't have the proper sequence of stories done, that we had other things to do....
> 
> Well, as you can see, it didn't help. So hopefully you'll enjoy the results of our little obsession (which, for those who follow Aegis and the Avengers, is set after _Opening Day _.)__

They had to “borrow” another car. Even if the truck they’d come in hadn’t been a burned-out, crumpled wreck, SHIELD knew it. Two neighborhoods away from the old base, Natasha picked a powder-blue SUV with honor student bumper stickers.

“Figure it’ll match your driving style,” she smirked through the pain. Steve rolled his eyes as he made sure she could hold herself together.

He waited until Maryland to stop at a convenience store - several, actually, before he found one with an operational payphone - and buy gas and supplies. It wasn’t the first time that Steve was glad he always carried cash; he still hadn’t gotten comfortable living in a world where you paid for things with a piece of plastic.

“Please pick up, please pick up,” he muttered under his breath. Pepper might not answer, especially for a public phone, even with a recognition code. Or her receiver might be turned off, given that it was around four a.m.

He was waiting for the fifth ring when she relieved him of that worry.

“Hello?” She did sound like she’d just woken up. Of course, by her next sentence, she was well on her way to clear-headed. “Who is this?”

“It’s Steve. Natasha and I are in trouble.”

“Are you okay?” The sharp worry, oddly enough, took a bit of the tension from Steve’s shoulders. Pepper worried meant things got done, and fast.

“We’ll be fine, but Fury’s dead.” He summarized the rest. He didn’t need to spell things out for Pepper.

“Oh god.” There was a pause, presumably while she sat in shock. Luckily, Pepper being shocked only lasted a few seconds.

“What do you need us to do?”

“Don’t let on you know. Don’t trust anyone but Toni. Maybe mobilize the suit, if she can do it with without tipping anyone off. The eastern seaboard is about to be a war zone.”

“On it. What about you?”

“I’ll stop them.”

He could almost hear her worrying her lip. “We’re pretty attached to you, Steve. Don’t die on us.”

A sudden rush of emotion clamped his throat shut. A blink and a few swallows fixed it.

“I’ll do my best,” he told her in an almost-normal voice. “Bye, Pepper.”

* * *

Antonia Stark was doing an almost lazy Mach 2 over the Siberian wilderness when she got the call, mapping the last known position of a Stark survey team against what data her satellite feeds could give her through the raging snowstorm sending plumes of cloud up toward her. Her music feed had just finished Gould's _Goldberg Variations_ and hit the first few bars of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World” when JARVIS cut in with a call over the secure satlink. That was normal protocol - there were four people in the world with any access to the Aegis network, and none of them were people Toni had a habit of ignoring. Much. Often. No matter what Rhody or Pepper might say on the subject

“Isn’t it o’dark thirty where you are, bright eyes?” she asked the open channel that JARVIS had IDed as coming from Pepper in New York. “Even by your industrious standards?”

Pepper’s favorite 90s grunge was playing loudly in the background. That was weird.

“Remember how you don’t trust SHIELD?”

“I don’t trust anybody. It’s a personal fault, or so my therapist tells me. Probably brought on by knowing too much about people at a delicate age.” Toni’s eyes kept tracking data while she talked, part of her mind processing the most likely shelter locations she wanted to check. “What does Fury want now?”

“He’s dead. The people who killed him are about to start a war with, well, everyone. They already tried to blow up Steve. He’s fine, or at least he was three minutes ago.”

Toni took five, maybe seven seconds to process that. It was a long time for her, but even though it wasn’t a lot of data, it brought a lot of baggage with it. Hard to imagine Fury was actually dead - she’d believe that when she actually stepped on the body and then checked it. Twice. But that could wait. People were trying to start wars and blow up Steve Rogers.

She couldn’t have that.

“Where, who are they, and tried to blow him up with what?” She flicked her fingers, dumping her data onto an anonymous server via satlink and forwarding it to the Stark SAR team that was due on site in a couple of hours. She hated to leave people out in the cold, but they ought to be fine. Even if they weren’t, wars took priority over assisting with SAR.

“It’s going to start in DC, Hydra, and I have no idea but the important thing is that they were SHIELD explosives, Toni. They’re everywhere, could be anyone.” She sighed. “I really hate it when your paranoia is justified.”

Toni twisted her body to send Aegis soaring straight up and said nothing. In fact, she said nothing for long enough that she could hear Pepper starting to worry, but she couldn’t spare the brain cycles for that. Not yet.

 _Hydra. DC. SHIELD explosives._ The words and everything that came with them rattled around in her head, breaking up and recombining and breaking up again. She’d tried to explain it to Pepper once and given up about the time she started trying to invent a game of four dimensional chess just to have a workable metaphor. _Steve. Fury. DC. The Triskelion. DC. Fury. Insight. War with the world. Hydra._

“Fuck me,” she whispered. “Motherfucker.”

“Toni? What do you know?” Now Pepper had gone from shocked and scared to the particular kind of smoothly composed that came before full-blown panic.

“Too damn much. We know too damn much. Pepper, someone used SHIELD gear to try to tag Steve. SHIELD personnel. If they could get people into SHIELD, they can get people into Stark. And if they can get people into Stark, they can get people close to you. Close to Rhodey. And that’s not even the scary part.” Toni let her acceleration drop, almost coasting on her own velocity as the sky over her faded from blue toward black. “Do not under any circumstances touch anything outside the Aegis network, my workshops or our bedroom. At least not while looking like you know anything. And we need to get your suit to you.”

“Yes, I figured that part out, Toni. If that isn’t it, what’s the scary part?” Irritation was better. It meant she was closer to a rage fest rather than panic. Rage could be useful.

“Fury asked me to help on something. Something big. I figured being inside was better than letting him go ahead without me. Remember the upscaled repulsor design? Upgrades for the helicarrier?” Toni closed her eyes. The voice in her head she’d carried out of the desert was trying to scream at her for being stupid, letting her tech out of her sight, but she ignored it. Shut it out. Time for that later. This was triage.

Her speed was still dropping. In another minute, maybe less, she’d lose the last of her momentum and start falling. The thought made her smile in a way that showed teeth.

Falling was about right, just now.

Pepper’s composure finally cracked, as did her voice when she yelled her next questions. “You mean Hydra has a repulsor-powered Helicarrier? In DC?”

“Three of them. I think. With satellite assisted gunnery, unless I misread what the stabilization specs on the engines were for. I could be wrong about that.” Toni lit off her thrusters again, and the pull of acceleration drove some of the breath out of her for a few seconds. _Straight up over the pole, duck through the old NORAD installations. That’s the best route for this._ “And if SHIELD had them and Fury’s dead, then Hydra probably has them. Yes. So I’m going to need a bigger boat. JARVIS, warm up Highside Station Two.”

In the background, Pepper seemed to be ranting about Toni, Fury, and even Steve, which meant things were really out of hand. Whoever survived had a lecture coming.

“May I remind you, ma’am, that the Highside Stations have been exposed to stratospheric atmosphere conditions for over a year without being accessed, and their contents may not be ready for combat conditions?” her AI reminded her primly.

“Just do it, JARVIS.” She dipped her hands to gain altitude, pushing past Mach 4 and still accelerating. “Pepper....”

A moment passed, and then Toni’s significantly better half managed to pull herself together. “Rescue’s on her way. I’ll do the meetings like I usually do, then gear up as soon as I can be gone for more than ten minutes. I’ll warn Rhodey, too. What’s your ETA?”

“Assuming I don’t run into unexpected trouble, forty minutes to Highside Two. Maybe fifteen to twenty gearing up - JARVIS is right, I have to check the equipment. Then an hour to DC. Call it two hours if I’m willing to be loud. Six if I’m going to come in under the radar.”

“Which you will, unless they bring out the carriers. You can’t help if they shoot you down.” That was Pepper’s no-arguments voice riding on top of buckets of fear. It was only with Toni that the redhead let her less media-friendly emotions show. By the time she stepped into the elevator, she’d be as composed as ever.

“Yes, ma’am.” In spite of herself, in spite of the world going to pieces around them, Toni smiled. _I love you. I don’t know what I’d do without you. If anyone touches you, I’m going to blow them to little pieces._ “Try not to scrape up the paint job on your present. I just got her for you.”

She was rewarded with a watery chuckle. “I love you too, Toni. See you in DC.”

“I’d better not. You don’t have guns on that thing, remember?” Futile or not, Toni at least had to try to protest. Honor and what passed her for sanity demanded it.

“Why, yes, Toni, I do. I also remember that the last time you, Steve and SHIELD were in a fight together there was massive property damage and disaster-like conditions on the ground.”

Toni chewed on that for a couple of seconds. “Somewhere in there is an objection I can make without sleeping on the couch for six months. I just know there is.”

“Let me know when you find it,” Pepper said briskly, knowing she wouldn’t. “I have a game face to put on.”

The connection dropped, and Toni sighed. “Never fall in love, JARVIS,” she said in her best long-suffering voice. “You start losing arguments. It’s infuriating.”

JARVIS produced a very credible imitation of a dignified snicker. She was going to have to do something about that later, too.

If she lived through the day, she’d think about it.


	2. Chapter 2

Fury was a hardass, but Steve had lots of practice holding his ground against tough guys. Add Agent Hill to the line and it was almost easy to get the former Director to agree to his admittedly very expensive plan. In Fury’s defense, it was an impressive show of resolve for a dead guy.

And Toni could probably salvage quite a bit from the mess and do a nice swords-to-ploughshares project. Pepper would like that. Heck, he’d like it.

Assuming any of them survived this.

“I’m calling Toni,” he announced. “We need all the help we can get.”

Agent Hill frowned in an expressive fashion, but said nothing. Fury looked disturbingly resigned.

“You mean Stark?” Sam blinked. “Is having a techie worth the risk? We’re doing okay on our own.”

Steve just picked up the handset for Fury’s secure sat phone, figuring that the call would clarify things. It took a few seconds for it to sync with one of Toni’s satellites - a commercial one - and a few more for the code he recited to talk to whatever it was in the innards of the thing made it link with Toni’s suit. Or handset. Or whatever. For all he knew, she’d put a phone in a necklace next.

“Toni. Where are you?”

“Little busy, sweetheart,” Toni answered after a second or two of peculiarly flat silence punctuated only by the sound of her breathing. Heavily, too. “Gimme a second.” A low, rough grunt of effort, then a hiss of satisfaction. “Better. I’m over the North Atlantic. Also behind schedule. Did you know SHIELD was building knock-offs of my gear? Because if you did and didn’t tell me, I’m telling Pepper on you. I hate knock-offs. And how are you, by the way?”

He couldn’t tell if he was relieved, worried, or about to figure out how to punch Toni from long distances. Maybe all three. “Fine,” he dismissed the question, which was true enough and kept him from thinking about the series of emotional gut-punches that his day had been. “We have a plan to take down the new helicarriers. It’s stealth but we could use some cover.”

“You know I do distraction like no one else,” she drawled, then grunted the way she always did when they sparred and he hit her in the ribs - not nearly as hard as he could, not ever, but she bitched if he didn’t hit her hard enough to bruise. “Damn. This guy’s not totally pathetic. Wait one.”

He counted to forty before her voice came back on the line. “And stay down. Maybe the fish will like you better than I do. If I can slip my tails, where do you want the Aegis and when?”

Steve wondered if Toni talked to herself like that all the time she was Aegis. Probably.

“I think right over the Chesapeake. Go as quiet as you can until Agent Hill gives the signal.” He took a breath and tried to treat Toni like any other soldier. It almost worked. “Can you get backup? It’s a lot of firepower to go up against alone.” _Dear God, please don’t let me lose someone else._

“I don’t know. I’ll see what I can pull together. Try not to do anything exceptionally heroic, Steve,” Toni told him. When she said it, _heroic_ sounded like a synonym for _stupid_.

Despite everything, he had to smile. “Says the woman who flew a nuke into a space portal.” In his peripheral vision, Sam stood up straighter. Toni was going to be upset about that later.

If they both survived, he’d take her temper gladly.

“Not one of my better moments,” she drawled. “Temporary insanity. Don’t imitate me, boy scout.”

“Why would I? You’re a terrible role model.”

“And don’t you forget it.” Her voice softened with affection, just for a second or two. “I’d better see you on the ground afterward, blue eyes.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said again, unwilling to promise anything else. Loss was cruel enough without that, too.

Whatever else she wanted to say to him, he wasn’t going to get to hear. Her voice was suddenly flat, hard, that peculiarly sharp-edged calm that she always used in a fight when things were too serious for jokes. “More customers incoming. Busy now. Tell Hill that the next time she loses the keys, I’m not giving her a new car.”

The line cut off, saving Steve from having to come up with a dry rejoinder. He put the phone back. The room was holding its breath.

After a beat of silence, Agent Hill nodded at him. “Give me the code you used so I can contact her when it’s time.” That seemed to break the tension, and they all threw themselves into the tasks at hand.

Looking up from the ‘liberated’ Falcon unit, Sam gave him a wry look. “Why’d you go and let me in on her noble secret? That means I have to respect Toni Stark now, Steve. Toni fucking Stark.”

Steve chuckled. “I know. Strange, isn’t it?”  

“And that doesn’t even include the fact that he’s having it off with her,” Natasha spoke up in a brisk, British accent that sounded thirty years older than she was.

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose. “Weren’t you the secretive one?” he grumbled. It was really unfair that he didn’t know any embarrassing personal details of hers. Probably because she had even less of a personal life than he did.

“Well, damn, there go my chances,” Sam sighed. Startled, Steve’s attention snapped to the ex-soldier, who was grinning like a maniac. Steve started to relax. “Joking, man, joking.” Sam gave it a beat before he dropped the other shoe. “Besides, I usually go for the bad boys.”

The words slipped past Steve’s beat-up mental armor and cut deep.

> “You didn’t have to do that.” Steve remarked through a bloody nose. He leaned heavily on Bucky as they limped home. Behind them in the alley they’d just left, a neighborhood thug lay bleeding and groaning.
> 
> “Yeah, I did,” Bucky replied sharply. “The only thing that asshole understands is brute force.”  
> 
> “You aren’t a brute. I don’t like it when you act like one.”
> 
> “That’s where you’re wrong, Steve. I think about beating scum like him all the time. I just never get to because I’m hauling your ass out of trouble.”
> 
> The smaller man smiled with bloody teeth. “Oh, okay. A regular bruiser, that’s you.”
> 
> With a short laugh, Bucky squeezed Steve’s shoulder. “Oh, yeah. The girls go wild for bad boys.” Then, in a half-whisper no one else could hear, “And some stubborn guys, too.”
> 
> Steve squeezed back. “Guess I’m just a sucker that way.”

Captain America found himself staring at his own clenched fists. Before he could open them he needed to take several deep, steadying breaths.

Unsurprisingly, Sam and Natasha were watching him cautiously.

“Sorry, Cap,” Sam, fortunately, looked concerned rather than offended. “Didn’t mean to set something off.”

“Not your fault.” Steve shook his head. “I think I have it under control, now.”

 _The Mojave Desert is full of the wrecks of test pilots who had it ‘under control,’_ Toni’s voice said in his head, soft the way it was when she talked to him in the small hours of the morning and didn’t want Pepper to wake or hear. _Watch yourself, Rogers._

Sam seemed torn between accepting his answer and calling bullshit. Steve wasn’t sure which was the better call. “Just...” He swallowed. What was there to say? They needed him. He needed to fulfill his duty of fighting Hydra. His heart needed to save Bucky. Not all of these needs could be met at the same time. “Just be ready.”

“We will be,” Natasha said, and that was reassuring in its way. Because she would. Whatever needed doing, however ugly it might be, Natasha would always be ready to do it.

If only he could be that sure about himself.

* * *

At around six fifteen a.m., JARVIS texted Pepper to let her know that Rescue had safely reached one of the New England summer houses Toni kept under an alias. A bit upstate was the closest possible low-gunfire-probability, good-hiding-place-with-a-bathroom landing site JARVIS had access to. While Pepper was momentarily tempted to have her suit take the New Haven train all the way to Grand Central, she decided against it. She would have to get there herself.

It took her about twenty minutes to juggle her schedule around to include a late lunch meeting with a promising new startup in Hartford. The startup actually existed, and she was going to visit them. But the baby techies would be a side issue. The important part was that she’d be within easy reach of Rescue if someone tried to come after her, and it wouldn’t look suspicious if she bunked over at one of the summer houses. She could be armored in DC in under an hour.  

Finding a hidden place to wait for destruction was her least detailed and most dreaded part of the plan, but she knew she’d manage. Somehow.

She fished some ulcer medication out of the bathroom and put it in her purse. Then she pulled the bottle back out, took a dose, and nestled it next to her personal phone. Well, her primary personal phone. The secure network satellite emergency phone was in the pocket of her blazer.

Making her usual morning rounds in the tower was difficult - forcing her fear down and looking calm and pleasant took lots of energy - but seemed to be effective. Nobody mentioned her emotional state or bearing or anything else being different from normal.

Right before she got into the limo, she snagged a danish to reward herself for that.

Happy raised an eyebrow in the rear-view mirror when she told him to turn before they even got to New Haven. “I need something at the summer house,” she explained even as he took the off-ramp. He’d find out soon enough what that was. She didn’t want to wade through his incredulity, envy, worry, or any other emotions he’d have at her if she told him more.

That, and she didn’t want to test his loyalty.

She pursed her lips. Another thing she hated Hydra for was throwing previously rock-solid trust into question.

He waited outside for her.

Rescue was waiting for her in the garage next to the BMW convertible. There were a few dead bugs plastered to the helmet, but otherwise she was just as beautiful as the first time Pepper saw her.

“Hello, Miss Potts.”

All at once she felt so light that she half-expected her next inhalation to buoy her into the air. She was vaguely aware of one of her goofy smiles.

A few floaty steps, and she was within arm’s reach. As soon as she laid her hand on Rescue’s shoulder, strength flowed into Pepper. The edge of panic she’d been riding all day fell away.

“Hello, girl. Good to see you.”

“Ms. Stark says I’m supposed to keep an eye on you.” In the week after their first test flight, Toni had modified JARVIS’s default voice mesh to incorporate not only a feminine register but some of Pepper’s vocal mannerisms. Toni had refused to tell her what she’d originally been collecting that data and programming for. _You did say you always wanted a sister,_ her boss/lover/tech genius/headache had pointed out by way of distraction. _Yes,_ she’d quipped, _but I didn’t expect you to build me one._  “Please don’t get into any trouble that will require me to break the garage door. Ms. Stark would be insufferable if she noticed.”

She smirked, and wondered how Rescue interpreted that. “She isn’t already insufferable?”

Those armored shoulders echoed what she was pretty sure was her shrug. “She could get worse. She can always get worse.”

Pepper laughed. “Point taken. And don’t worry, I’ll be sitting and talking and watching Power Point presentations all afternoon. Maybe if I get really wild I’ll let them take me out to the 8-bit arcade bar.”

“Drinking too much is bad for your ulcer, Miss Potts.” Oh, God, did she actually sound that prim? Probably. _Toni fucking Stark._ Resisting the urge to shove the suit (both a useless and potentially manicure-damaging move), she tapped the helmet instead.

“I’ll be back tonight, spoilsport. Enjoy the garage.”

* * *

Highside Two was not exactly built for its scenic view, but Toni had to admit it was breathtaking. The helium balloons that suspended its hundred and twenty tons of stealth-coated metal in the upper stratosphere had been buried in a platform prototype intended for weather study when she’d first seen their schematics, and she’d barely had to make any improvements.

The contents, on the other hand, were definitely not the originally intended package of sensors.

“It takes a special kind of paranoia,” she observed to nobody in particular while she watched the automated assembly system struggle with peeling the damaged pieces of her armor off, “to hide multiple copies of a personal WMD in near-space just because you might need them. What does it say about the world that I actually need it?”

“Anxiety and paranoia are conditions for which you are supposed to be receiving therapeutic treatment, Ms. Stark,” JARVIS noted over the speakers built into the wall. The state of the electronics gave her AI’s voice a hissing quality. “I would not like to report backsliding to Miss Potts.”

“Tattletale,” she grumbled, then winced and took a deep breath. “One of those Hydra suits bruised a rib, I think. Hopefully not cracked. I’ll check it when you get this damned wreck off me.”

“Twenty-to-one odds are not conducive to maintaining equipment in optimal condition.”

“‘Quantity has a quality all its own.’” She rolled her eyes. “JARVIS, have I ever told you that you’re a terrible shoulder to cry on?”

“I do not, as a technical matter, have shoulders. Please remain still. This component will require cutting.”

“‘Please remain calm,’” Toni muttered, mimicking the AI’s voice as best she could. “‘I’m only going to be waving a plasma torch around your forearms. Please disregard any burning sensation as perfectly normal.’”

“I suppose this would be a bad time to point out that you would most likely feel nothing at all if the torch made contact with your body. The nerves would die nearly instantaneously.”

She closed her eyes. Watching wasn’t going to make her less nervous. “Did I program you to be such a literalist killjoy?”

“You are fully responsible for my programming and maintenance, Ms. Stark.” The weight on her arm changed. “You may move your arm again.”

“Maybe I ought to talk to my therapist about my masochistic tendencies.” Toni stood slowly, the last of the frame of the Alpha copy of her Mark XIII armor clattering on the decking, and gave it a momentary and mournful smile. “You did good work, but I have to go now.”

She was aware, of course, that the armor wouldn’t have been able to answer her even if it hadn’t been reduced to scrap. But talking to her armor was one of her less harmful PTSD quirks, and today was a day that nothing short of acute symptoms was going to be worth spending the time on.

No word from Rogers yet. They’d probably move a little after dawn, which gave her four hours of downtime before she needed to be ready to get shot at again.

She’d wrap her knuckles and her ribs, and she’d check the Mark XVIII prototype twice. It had, after all, been stored up here since she’d fabricated it and run initial testing on it. And then she’d try to get a couple hours of sleep on the hard metal decking.

“It could be worse,” she reminded herself. “You could be back in the desert. At least it’s cool.”

JARVIS, in a rare display of tact, kept quiet.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Pepper was still smiling to herself at the look on Happy’s face when he’d seen her lift off. It was worth the fact that she was probably going to feel obliged to pay for the phone he’d splashed on the driveway. But that was for later. Right now, she had to watch the terrain. Flying into the landscape, as Toni had determinedly tried to drill into her, was a bad way to handle your hardware.

Speaking of which.... “Toni.”

Three seconds. Four. Ten. Thirty. A minute of silence, of her pulse hammering in the shell of Rescue’s warm metal.

“Pepper.” Toni sounded like she was still getting her breath back. Still recovering from a hard sprint. “JARVIS shows you’re in the green on gear - everything functional.”

“I just left Happy at the Connecticut house and am heading to DC. What’s up with you?”

“Had another little tussle with Hydra. They decided to try to rip us off. Personal flight warsuits. Their quality control wasn’t up to the job yesterday, and they aren’t doing any better today. But they certainly are serious about the cut-off-one-head, two-will-replace-it business. We should find a way to track who’s buying high-grade metals in bulk. Seriously, this has to have put a dent in _someone’s_ production line.”

Pepper took a deep breath to quash her surge of anxiety. Her therapist was big on breathing. “So deep surveillance is OK if you’re the one doing it. Got it. Any word from the good Captain?”

“Still with us. Planning to do something a little braver and crazier than usual to stop the three - yes, three - Insight carriers from killing a bunch of people. Last time I help Fury with anything. And to be fair to myself, nobody’s stolen _my_ stuff. Much. Okay, I need a better defense. I’ll get back to you on that.”

“ _That_ will definitely be a discussion later.” Assuming there was a later for any of them. Rescue’s pilot worried her lip. “We’re all a little braver and crazier than is good for us, I think. Hopefully we can keep it to a little.” Then she blinked. “Fury’s alive?”

“If he isn’t, I owe myself a bottle of really nice Scotch.” She could hear Toni grinning. “The man has more lives than the proverbial cat.”

Pepper snorted a laugh, and then the tension caught the end of it and magnified it into a bad case of giggles. “Sorry,” she managed between bouts. “Do you need anything, Toni?”

“A warm bath, a couple of bottles of champagne, that little villa up in the Alps we liked so much, and at least three escorts - gender of your choice - to shock Steve with. Think you can arrange all that, Miss Potts?”

That set her off again. “Of course, Ms. Stark,” she replied, gasping for breath. _Toni might die._ The thought rolled around her mind like a lead sphere. _Steve might die, too. We could all die._ Part of her was looking at her laughter and sex thoughts with muted horror, but the rest of her clung to them all the tighter for their looming mortality. “And a selection of Europe’s finest sex toys.”

“Amen to that.” Toni’s voice changed, just for a second. Just long enough for her to hear the hard metal and the fear under it.  Then it was all business again. “Pepper... watch your six. Hydra isn’t going to respect medevac.”

Somehow, she managed to pull together her crisp business voice. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good woman. I’d say don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, but that leaves too big a margin for stupid.” A little grin worked its way back into Toni’s voice. “Just be safe. I love you.”

For some reason, Pepper didn’t feel terrified. “Love you too, maniac. Take care.”

She was coming up on the suburbs of Baltimore. Local emergency bands were still quiet. Two whole major cities, and almost nothing going on. It was an eerie kind of calm, like waiting for the thunderclap after seeing lightning touch down.

Toni broke connection without saying anything else. Maybe, wherever she was, she could feel the silence too.

DC came over the horizon, spreading out as she closed in. Higher than commercial jets and in a wide arc, Pepper kept well out of forbidden airspace. Even if she’d had more than twenty or so flight hours, she would have done the same. Fast and loose with extremely expensive tech was her girlfriend’s department. Still, it meant that on her test flights Toni could tell her how close was too close, how to stay more or less hidden from radar and simple visual, how to manage her heat generation to stay under the tolerances of the thermal baffling that hid her from infrared sensors, how to move what was essentially a human-sized jet around in the air smoothly. Pepper wouldn’t make Top Gun any time soon, but she didn’t need to.

Settling into a long, elliptical holding pattern over the city, she called up the HUD scanners. No disasters had erupted yet.

“Rescue, how long can I stay up here?”

“With our current capacitor load, we’ve got one hundred and seventy-three hours before we need to enter a low power mode, Miss Potts.”

“Oh.” She blinked, then laughed. “I think I might need a sandwich before then.”

“Power needs are probably going to go up more than a little in the near future, boss.”

She wondered if the AI could tell if she was rolling her eyes. Probably. The better question would be if she cared.

“Okay, sass-bot, keep your eyes and ears open for everything. I’m going to take a nap.” When Toni had first told her that she often slept in the air, Pepper had been aghast, but since her own personal branch of JARVIS could fly Rescue perfectly without her, it was actually pretty safe. Weird as hell, but some days Pepper wasn’t sure she’d recognize normal any more.

Of course, Rescue didn’t help the weirdness by starting to play some of her favorite falling-asleep cello music the moment she said so. But it was a pleasant sort of weirdness. Mostly.

* * *

At 80 klicks straight up over Washington DC, Antonia Stark had a view that most people would have said was unique and priceless. A few kilometers under the sodium layer of the mesosphere, a lonely still point in the buffet of winds and atmospheric distortions powerful enough to snap skyscrapers like twigs, she occupied a space that humanity had needed unmanned ultralight balloons and rocket-fueled planes to penetrate - and even that, rarely. It was an amazing feeling. Almost - not quite - unique.

But it wasn’t priceless. Antonia could calculate, if she had the time and the inclination, exactly how many dollars and work-hours it had taken to bring her up here in the warsuit wrapped around her. Or exactly how many centimeters of skin and how many milliliters of blood, if she was feeling morbid.

 _Dwelling,_ her therapist’s voice said in her head, _is not a healthy habit, Toni._

She’d said something off-hand and flippant to that. Probably Satchel Paige. It was the kind of moment that would have called for Satchel Paige. But up here, waiting for something to happen, she had to admit that the woman might have a point. Again. Damn her.

“Reserves status?” She could read the answer on her HUD, of course. But talking to JARVIS was a good way to kill time. The thought made her wince. _Bad choice of words, Toni._

“Capacitors at seventy-eight percent.” JARVIS disapproved. Of course. “May I recommend that we remain here until solar and reactor draw bring us back to a more optimal status?”

“We go when we go.”

“That is not an attitude calculated to maximize your chances of survival.”

Toni closed her eyes and counted to ten. _Let’s program an AI to be capable of learning and self-motivation. That’ll be fun. It’s not like it’ll sass me every chance it gets, right?_ “I can do the math, JARVIS.”

She’d be building power faster without the extra weight, of course. But the extra weight was part of the point. Armor, weapons, extra capacitors. If the carriers got off the ground, she’d need all of them. Maybe more than she was carrying.

Well, you went to war with the horses you had. She couldn’t remember who’d said that to her first. It sounded like Rhodey. God, she hoped he was safe. She didn’t have enough friends that she could afford to lose any.

The comm blinked in the corner of the HUD. It was Hill.

“The carriers have begun the launch sequence,” she said, calm and efficient. “We’re operational.”

“Miss Hill,” Toni said, her own voice that particularly surreal sort of conversational she’d noticed it tended to be when she was paying attention to about a hundred other things all at once, “have I ever mentioned to you that you must have left a fortune on the table in phone sales when you went to work for SHIELD?”

“Agent.” Her voice was still as calm, but the tiniest thread of exasperation ran through it. Toni could just see the Deputy Director’s jaw tighten in the way it often did when dealing with the Aegis pilot. It warmed the heart.

“I didn’t know we were on a first name basis.” Toni cut thrust and let herself drop, a ballistic arc as close to purely vertical as aerodynamics allowed. Radar, even the radar around DC, wasn’t designed to track objects without a horizontal velocity greater than the average car. The arrays might pick her up, but the computers would discard her as a junk return.

Planning intrusions was easier when you wrote the original software.

Her HUD was flooding with data now - satellite feeds, status reports from her own systems, pirate signals from SHIELD. There were a hundred different kinds of security built into the Aegis, but the best and simplest was the interface itself. Rescue and the War Machine (Rhodey’s joke, not hers) were different creatures, simplified with automation and backstopped by JARVIS as a copilot - the Aegis itself was built around Toni, around her mind and her habits and the way her eyes moved. She’d given Rhodey a twenty-minute simulator ride with the unfiltered interface once and he’d come out swearing at her to stop joking around. _Nobody could fly that,_ he’d bitched over drinks. _It’s worse than six stealth bombers at once._

But to Antonia Stark, it was the closest thing to home she could imagine that didn’t involve Pepper Potts within arm’s reach. It kept her pulse slow and her adrenaline to a pleasant shiver while she dropped out of the sky toward the most heavily defended facility in the country and whatever nightmare Nick Fury had managed to conjure out of steel and bleeding edge tech.

A photo file attachment pinged from Hill’s data uplink. It was a double-bird selfie.

“Oh, Agent,” Toni sighed, modulating her voice into its most charmingly rakish timbre, “I had no idea you cared. Just let me talk things over with a certain redhead, and then I will definitely take you up on that.”

One minute and forty-three seconds until she’d either cut in power or hit the deck the hard way. Toni resisted the urge to whistle.

“You have about eight minutes until they’re operational. They may or may not be trying to kill you at that point. Good luck.” The feed cut out.

“JARVIS,” Toni chuckled, “I think I may be losing my legendary way with women.”

JARVIS, for his part, didn’t dignify that with a reply. Shame. She’d built him - he really should have been a better audience. It probably said something about her relationship with her father or her self-image that he wasn’t. Maybe she ought to take that up with her therapist. Really open up. Get in touch with her inner self.

Alternatively, she could blow a hundred billion dollars of terrorist-controlled warship into scrap metal. That sounded a lot more cathartic.

Seventy-two seconds.

She probably ought to tell Steve that she was changing the plan, but he’d figure it out soon enough. Probably best not to distract him while he was doing whatever violence he happened to be doing to the Hydra thugs in the Triskelion.

Metal doors pushed up out of the water and started to open. Dramatic. Not very efficient. Obviously Fury hadn’t been worried about corrosion or potential flooding. Secrecy made people do exceptionally stupid things.

Maybe she ought to rethink the idea for caching armor in the Bay. But it would have been so nice to put one over on Sergei by parking next to his barge. Well, she’d think more about it.

She was running a pretty impressive list of pending tasks, even for her.

One of her monitor feeds from Hill showed running gunfights on half the levels of the Triskelion. SHIELD agents against coworkers, friends, enemies they hadn’t known were enemies. “Phil would be proud of you,” she told nobody who could hear her. It just seemed like the thing to say.

She was doing well over Mach 3 on pure ballistic velocity when she cut in the thrusters over the open pits of the Insight doc and whipped around the face of the Triskelion, shattering bullet-resistant windows in her wake.

SAMs ripple-fired after her, and she picked up thermal bloom from Quinjets and F-35s jockeying to get off the decks of their motherships. She snap-rolled, spitting flares, and then cut down close enough to the water to spray droplets at least a hundred meters up. Missile seekers lost acquisition, reacquired and collectively committed fratricide. Forty-eight tracks became thirty, twelve, three. Two hit the water trying to follow her turn.

She blew the remaining Stinger out of the sky with a repulsor shot, definitely not an option contemplated by the designer, and took a breath. The short-range infrared seekers were the easy part - the defense systems shooting from the hip. The air-defense radar installations would be trying to get a track on her now, and that little stunt wouldn’t do any good against a RIM-67 or a Patriot.

Well, she’d deal with that when it happened. The Aegis wasn’t nearly out of tricks they hadn’t seen yet.

“I think I have their attention.” She broke up and left to double back for the Triskelion, counting on JARVIS’s electronic reflexes as much as her own to call the turn.

“Yes, Miss Stark,” JARVIS sighed, “I believe that you do.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

He’d tried to prepare for it. The moment he’d have to go through Bucky. And he’d given up about five minutes after starting, because there was no way to prepare for that.

“Please don’t make me do this.” As hard as he tried, he couldn’t get the pleading tone out of his voice. Just like he couldn’t completely cut his feelings for Bucky out of his mind. He never had been.

It hurt. The knife and the bullet, sure, but more than that, just seeing Bucky’s face so empty. Having to take him down. The way he screamed when Steve dislocated his flesh-and-bone shoulder.

And then he was under Bucky, wrapped around him with all his limbs, choking the resistance out of him. It was an awful, twisted echo of the other times they’d been twined together - but he couldn’t think about that. Not now. Now with so many depending on him.

 _You ever think about getting out?_ Sam said in the back of his head.

_Don’t know what I’d do if I did._

Could anything - even being totally adrift in the twenty-first century without a structure to hold on to - be worse than this?

 _Millions of people could die. Still might. Do the job, Rogers._ His conscience was a hell of a lot worse than any drill sergeant he’d ever had.

Another ounce of pressure and the spinal column would go. Bucky would go limp and stay that way. Natasha would have done it. Fury would have. Maybe Sam, too. But he couldn’t.

So he held on, and eventually the struggling stopped. It would give him time. Enough to stop Hydra.

Then he’d find a way to get Bucky out of here.

* * *

Between the flak cannons and the fighters tearing up the sky trying to catch her, Antonia Stark couldn’t exactly take the time to hold a position and burn half a capacitor load through the heavy repulsor array she’d built this suit around. Which was what it was going to take to cut through the armor of those carriers. Whatever heavy alloys Fury had used for the plating weren’t in the specs, and she was running out of time to think of a way around it. Or through it.

“Hill.” Her breath rasped in her throat. The flak shell she’d taken in the side had smashed the air out of her, and her lungs still burned. “You still alive?”

“So far. Waiting on Charlie carrier.” She sounded cool as always. Apparently genius-billionaire-playgirl-philanthropists were far more stressful than doomsday scenarios. “You?”

“Never better. Thinking of setting this up as a theme park ride.” _This is going to hurt._ She twisted at the waist to throw the Aegis into a dive that burned adaptive paint off the side of one of the carriers and plowed two of the four fighters on her tail into the plating behind her. Her ribs throbbed like someone was grinding a spike between them. “Steve,” she managed to get out through her teeth, unable to form the rest of the question.

“He checked in a minute ago. Should be done right about now.” A thread of worry worked its way into her last sentence.

“Falcon?” There. She was breathing again. _Going to have to watch the turns._

“Grounded.”

Damn. She hadn’t even heard him call that in. Losing more situational awareness up here could get her killed.

Could get a lot of people killed. _Think, Toni. Don’t just fly. Think._ “If I blow the computer bay on Charlie to scrap, what happens? Routes to backups, right?”

“Right.” She could hear Hill’s breath catch in her ear. “Ninety seconds. If you’re working up a backup plan, you’d better make it fast....”

“Kill the bay. Force a reroute. Manually kill its link to the system. Hope the other two drop it out of the loop and use your new targeting software.” A Hydra quinjet made a ramming run on her from above, and she blew it out of the sky. Smoke and debris drowned her vision, and she broke clear more by instinct than from anything on her sensors. If she had to make a run at the carrier’s belly, she was going to do it half-blind from jamming, but it was better than waiting out here and getting shot at.

“The chances of that working....”

“Are marginally better than our chances of survival if those things start shooting at us. Marginally.” Toni cut thrusters, dropped like a stone, then lit again. She’d be coming up at the bay, now.

“Got it.” Steve’s voice was tight and breathy at the same time, like he could barely control it. The list of things that could put Steve into that much pain was pretty short, and most involved gut wounds. Knees were another possibility.

“Get out of there.” She and Hill put the same thoughts into the same words at the same time. If Steve weren’t potentially bleeding out, it would bave been joke material.

“Take the shot.”

“Steve...” Hill. _Are you aware that you’re asking me to have the most heavily armed warships in the world shoot at each other while you’re on them?_

Toni’s throat clamped down on her voice. The only thing that rasped over the com-line was her breathing. She ignored the disobedient wetware and flexed her fingers, pouring on the acceleration. The distance to the belly of the carrier designated Charlie was an obstacle course of debris and desperate Hydra pilots, and the quantity of chaff in the air made radar useless. Thermal was no good in a sky this full of missiles, shells and flares. She’d have to do it by eye.

Steve Rogers was not going to die again while she had anything to say about it.

“Do it now.” _No. No no no no no no no no._ She would have been screaming inside her head if she’d had the attention to spare. She’d heard the recording of Steve putting the Hydra bomber in the water once. It was the same sound in his voice.

She didn’t know if she said the word or just thought she did. “Don’t.”

Whether she did or not, neither of them listened. The Insight carriers shifted bearings a few fractions of a degree and elevated their guns. It seemed to take the same kind of forever that her suit was taking to cross a distance that on a straight-line run would have been utterly trivial.

They opened fire.

* * *

“Jesus,” Pepper breathed. Despite the all the intel, descriptions and schematics that Pepper had received in the last hour, she still wasn’t prepared for the scale of the carriers. It was like three sizeable pieces of the city had decided to take off.

Every radio band, Twitter feed and telecom network that wasn’t completely dead was a cacophony of panic. After the first few seconds of that, she had Rescue turn it off and pipe in only the first responders’ chatter. They had formed a loose perimeter around the Triskelion and surrounding neighborhood, ready to spring into action. They had gone quiet once it became clear that all they could do was watch the threat loom until people on the ground needed help.

Pepper was swooping low over the city in the middle of a tactical argument with Rescue when the carriers started to destroy each other.  

While they were flying. Over DC.

“Shit!” she breathed, accelerating as she watched the first bits of debris fall. “Go!”

The electromagnetic field around her would protect her from falling objects - assuming nothing was made entirely of plastic - but it wouldn’t do much against bullets and rockets. For that she had to depend on the mechanical strength of the armor and the forcefield generators miniaturized from the Aegis. Those were rated to handle bullets, bombs and rockets, but a single shell from one of those big guns would wipe the charge in her capacitors if she was very, very lucky. Pepper darted around the lower edges of the catastrophe, glad that whatever Steve and Hill had done was keeping the Helicarriers’ cannons trained on each other. As long as she didn’t get herself in the crossfire, she could do her work. With Rescue she could catch plummeting fighter planes and push them into the river, put herself between the shrapnel and terrified bystanders, grab falling crew and put them safely - and securely - in the hands of the first responders.

The first two carriers wound up half in their own launch bays and half in the river, which was fine by her. The last one, however, was racking up a magnificently ironic property-damage score by cutting the damn Triskelion in half, shedding fighters, flaming shrapnel, glass, and steel girders everywhere. Bless SHIELD’s paranoid souls for building on an island; most of that also fell into the river, but preventing the rest from shredding the evacuating SHIELD agents would have kept Pepper and Rescue working fast even without the possibility of burning debris finding its way into a downtown DC office building full of highly flammable paper, drywall and bureaucrats.

“Oh, fuck you,” Pepper told IN-01. “I’ve had enough.”

Electromagnets and force fields powered up all the way, Pepper dropped diagonally down at the carrier and pushed. The specs Toni had given her - conservative specs, because Toni was always conservative in her specs - said she shouldn’t be able to lift it. But vector was the sum of angled forces to produce direction and momentum. The damned thing was already falling. All she had to do was push hard enough to convince it to fall where she wanted - into the river, where it would just be an environmental and budgetary disaster, instead of straight down onto the island where it would be a human catastrophe.

“Miss Potts,” Rescue whispered in what sounded a lot like awe, “I think it’s working.”

“Hydra can kiss my ass,” she spat. Not literally. She’d made that mistake on her second test flight. Ew.

She had to admit, it was pretty epic. Pushing God knew how many tons of death away from a few thousand people hit her with a rush of adrenaline and endorphins and probably other happy brain-drugs which she was going to punish Toni for years for not sharing sooner. By the time she was easing off, Pepper Potts was high as a kite on heroism.

Then Rescue’s priority alert tone hummed in her ears, and an emergency beacon code she didn’t recognize started blinking in the corner of her HUD. She barely had time for the faintest sound of confusion before Rescue anticipated her question.

“Aegis is in down and in the water.”


	5. Chapter 5

“The probability of survival if we continue through the fields of fire of all three helicarriers is 1.37894 percent.”

The carriers were like a madman’s Christmas tree, flaring with dozens of secondary explosions each second, but they were - impossibly - still in the air. Still firing. The proverbial unstoppable force and immovable object.

The object was losing, gravity was winning, and Steve Rogers was still on one of those falling ships.

“Shut up, JARVIS,” Toni snarled. “Redirect power to repulsor capacitors. I don’t want that super-glass stopping me.” She twisted around a falling sliver of hull at least three times the size of the Aegis. “Steve? Steve, talk to me. I need your twenty, blue eyes.”

Silence. She clenched her teeth. JARVIS tried to pull power from the thrusters to boost her kinetic barriers. She overrode it. There would be at least a minute before those things hit the water.

She was going to reach him if it killed her.

 _Crazy talk,_ the part of her brain that listened in her therapy sessions told her.

“Shut up.” The Aegis was climbing clear of the worst of the firestorm now - into the narrowing triangle of clear air between the three carriers in which none of their weapons bore on each other. She’d have a few seconds to think. To locate Steve, or at least an entry breach into the computer core. A few seconds would be all she needed.

Her radar proximity alert went from shouting to screaming. She veered left on reflex, trying to get a visual, and saw a world of metal bearing down on her like a semi on a particularly ambitious bug.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Stark.” The HUD flashed with JARVIS’s override codes as power dumped from the capacitors feeding her repulsors, her thrusters, her jets - everything but the kinetic barrier and armor reinforcements.

“JARVIS!” There wasn’t enough breath in her lungs for a scream, but she’d built him. He’d know what she wanted. Thrust. Power. Time.  Anything that would get her the few hundred meters between her and Steve Rogers.

IN-02 hit IN-03 at a lateral, slightly downward angle, shearing through damaged armor and tearing the whole other carrier in half. That tiny deviation from a perfect ram probably saved Toni’s life. That and the desperate, clawing obsession that had driven her to make the Aegis as close to invincible as technology and genius could make anything. The idea of engineering any suit to survive being ground between two hundred thousand ton junkpiles of explosion-laced metal would have struck even her as insane. Nothing, she would have predicted after a careful study of a physics model, could have stood any reasonable chance of surviving an impact like that.

She didn’t see either carrier hit the open bay of the hangar - crushed between two interior supporting walls of two different warships, she couldn’t have seen anything at all even if she’d been fully conscious. But she felt it like a crack in the foundations of the earth.

Metal screamed.

“Power reserves at seventeen percent.” JARVIS’s voice in her ear, calm and reasonable. “Please don’t try to move until the wreckage has come to a complete stop, Ms. Stark.”

 _Please, God,_ she thought, _don’t let me die listening to my damned AI make jokes._

* * *

“God.”

Pepper didn’t stop to stare at the smouldering mountain of carrier that was still sinking into the Potomac. Toni was under there somewhere. That was unacceptable.

“We spring any leaks?” she asked Rescue as she circled the wreck to find the best point of entry, or at least somewhere to start ripping parts off.

“We are fully pressurized.” A graphic popped in the corner of her HUD, displaying a rough approximation of the blueprint which the half a carrier beneath them no longer much resembled. “Based on magnetic resonance, I estimate this is the most likely position of the Aegis’s rescue beacon. Plus or minus a few compartments. We’re lucky - she’s near the forward crew quarters. Lots of small, cramped spaces. Lots of furniture and miscellaneous debris.”

“How is that lucky?”

“It won’t explode. Probably.”

Pepper grit her teeth. “No more commentary. In we go.”

Just as wind chill didn’t penetrate the suit, neither did the temperature of the water. The churned-up dirt and tiny pieces of debris floating in it didn’t slow her down either, not with her various sensors and a HUD to outline the big pieces.

Still, it was eerie falling, climbing and drifting down through the wreck, the water slowing her movements, only her own headlamps and repulsors lighting up the ruined battleship.

She didn’t know how deep she was when she found the bulkhead the HUD had tagged. Aegis’ distress beacon was just on the other side of it.

“Try to cut through that, or try to go around somehow?”

“Cut it. We’ll use the magnetics to brace the rest so it doesn’t fall. Hopefully.” Rescue didn’t have stress hormones or adrenaline or anything else to give her the shakes. Pepper really wished she could have made her own voice sound that calm right now. “Note to self: practice with simulations and models more.”

The space she was in had been a lounge, if the sofas she had to push to the side were any indication. It gave her enough wall that she was confident she could cut through it and not be in any danger of cutting through Aegis. On the other hand, she had to cut through close enough to be able to reach Toni and pull her out.

“Rescue, scan the wall. Give me Toni’s position.”  

A blue wireframe outline formed on her HUD. “Depending on how bad the damage is, things may be out of position. That’s the best I can do.”

 _‘Things.’_  Pepper felt her stomach churn. _Don’t think about it. Just keep moving._

Erring on the side of not cutting her girlfriend in half, Pepper pulled the torch down the acutely-angled wall near the edge of the room. The blue-white flame was bright enough that Rescue had to dim her optical feed down almost to nothing, but that was all right. The HUD had the edges of everything mapped out by that time, and she didn’t need to see anything else.

A minute or so later, she narrowed the magnetic field on her hand while cranking up the power. The door-sized oval of metal came away and fell to the floor in slow-motion. In the few seconds it took for the water to quench the glowing edges, Pepper had pushed her way through.

She found herself in a dark space no more than two, maybe two and a half feet wide at best. It stretched out in all directions, though, and she knew she was between the two half-carriers. A flattened fighter held the ships apart off to Pepper’s right.

To her left, Aegis did the same.

“Pepper Potts.” Toni’s voice was a pained rasp in her ear, but it was there. Real. Alive. “You look damn good in silver and red. I should have gotten you one of those years ago.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” Pepper joked with a slight tremble. She moved to her girlfriend as quickly as she dared. Up close, it was obvious that Aegis was jammed in but good.

“Oh, Toni. Only you would get your crazy ass caught between two helicarriers.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Toni coughed wetly. “Kinda. Damn. I’ve felt better. JARVIS won’t tell me if anything’s broken. I think the biometrics might be fried. Have suit diagnostics, though. Power reserves are around seven percent. Stress fractures in the armor plating, mostly around the torso. Right gauntlet’s crushed pretty good, but I think my hand’s okay. I’m shot full of painkillers, so it’s hard to tell. And Happy Thoughts tells me that I’m probably the only thing keeping this section of hull from collapsing.”

Pepper didn’t know if she wanted to hug or strangle Toni. Probably both. “That’s what it looks like. There’s no way I can push the whole thing off of you. I’m going to cut the wall out and pull you through to the room on the other side.”

“Miss Potts,” Rescue interjected, though not on the comm link to Aegis, “you know this is going to bring at least a hundred tons of metal - and at least that much water, if not more - down on top of us? Very quickly?”

“Is there a better plan?” Pepper asked. “Please?”

There was a pause of about thirty to forty seconds. By AI standards, a very long time. “Not really. I just wanted you to know.”

Pepper rolled her eyes. “You’re a big help. Just point me towards the shortest route to open water.”

“Of course.” A schematic and a pathway lit up on the HUD for a moment. There were at least four walls between the rec room and freedom.

“Right. I can do this.”

After spiking the plasma cutter through the hull at several points to mark Toni’s position, Pepper went back around into the rec room and started cutting.

“One more cut will probably break the integrity of the wall,” Rescue told her after a small eternity that her onboard chronometer insisted was only about twenty seconds. “Take a nice big slice and pull, Miss Potts.”

She pulled the torch through through another foot of hull and pulled hard with her other hand. As soon as she felt the metal start to give, she killed the flame and pulled with her whole robotically-assisted strength.

The piece of wall and Aegis came rushing out, and Pepper grabbed Toni an instant before Rescue turned the force field and kinetic barrier back on. Nothing happened for a long second, and then the room fell forward against the other carrier in a groaning crash. The obstruction didn’t stop it, though, and it started crumpling inward, furniture and wreckage floating down while the room itself got smaller. Rescue and Aegis were already pushing their way through a hole in the first wall, the motions automatic and coordinated, the larger warsuit putting itself between sharp edges and the lighter armor it was depending on to carry it. Rescue’s electromagnetic systems whined on the edge of overload, juggling the demands of moving them and pushing chunks of falling debris away, but then they were clear of the wreck and her jets lit off (bottled oxygen, a minute or less) and they broke water into clear air with the battered bulk of the Aegis hanging from Rescue like a rhino being pulled along by a particularly muscular deer.

“That was exciting,” Toni gasped. “We should do that again never. How much have you got in the tank?”

“About an hour. Unless we want to go hypersonic, in which case about fifteen minutes. I can do better if you find us somewhere to bask in the sun and purify all the water we just drank,” Rescue replied.

“That’s got to be the AI.” The parts of Toni’s voice not busy with sounding pained were ruefully aggrieved. “Right? You don’t sound nearly so chipper when I’ve nearly died.”

Getting her bearings again - scanning the island and shoreline, finding the first responders doing their jobs and only the tip of IN-01 above water - Pepper snorted. “You have only yourself to blame. And I have the makings of another ulcer with your name on it, thanks very much.” Things looked pretty much under control. She started for the hospital.

A metallic glint down near the riverbank caught her eye. She paused, looked closer. Felt her heart drop.

“Oh my god. Steve.”

“Drop me.” Toni paused a fraction of a second, then amended in a hurry. “Not from up here. Somewhere stable. I can pop the seals on the suit and shut down everything but the external security. Nothing’s wrong with me that’s going to kill me before you get back. He’s hurt, and bad. So find somewhere I won’t roll off and drop me.”

“I’m not dropping you.” She swooped down and lowered Aegis into the woods a few yards from where Steve lay. Breathing, thank God. “This okay?”

“This is okay. I’m shutting down. Leave me a message with how he’s doing - I’ll listen when I get a little more power to play with. Now get going, Miss Potts.” She couldn’t see Toni smiling behind that armored mask, but she could hear it. “You’ve got a name to live up to for the third fourth fifth.... whatever-eth time today.”

Satisfied that Toni would be safe-ish, Pepper nodded. “See you soon.”

About four seconds later, Pepper was furious. With Hydra, mostly, but also Fury (ghostly or otherwise), Agent Hill, and most definitely Steve himself. In addition to all the very obvious wounds, Rescue’s scanners also picked up internal bleeding, hairline fractures in way too many bones, and what would certainly be fatal brain damage in anyone else.

“Don’t you dare die on me, you stupid martyr.” His weight wasn’t an issue in picking him up, but his injuries were, and Pepper took her time to get him arranged in the least damaging position possible. “Don’t you dare.”

Handing him over to the ER team (escorted by a cross-agency cadre of guards she’d organized on her way there) gave her some relief. She felt ridiculous standing in the waiting room in a few billion dollars of Stark tech, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave, either - not for longer than it took to double back to Toni, strip her out of her barely charged gear (which she put somewhere no nosy investigators were likely to find) and bring her to the same hospital. That just left waiting to do, so she did it. Even if a photo of her flipping through a magazine was a meme twenty minutes after her second arrival.

“You looked bigger on TV,” said a voice behind her. It belonged to a beat-up, weary-looking black man who could still probably punch out a few Hydra thugs. “Though I guess that’s not your normal suit.”

“Sam Wilson,” Rescue told her, and displayed his personnel file and a video of him flying over the river like some kind of ballistic angel. Pepper smiled.

“I’m Rescue.” She held out a hand. “Aegis is recuperating.”

With a half-amused shrug, he shook her hand and introduced himself. “Glad to hear she’s okay. I saw her taking a lot of heat out there.”

Pepper tensed. “The identity of the Aegis pilot is very sensitive information, Mister Wilson. How did you get it?”

“Rogers got a call. I was so pissed.” Sam shook his fist in a gesture that was probably meant to be dramatic but lacked the energy to be more than pro forma. “And then Natasha - that’s her name, right? Red-head, made of trouble? - spilled the beans on the whole thing about Steve’s girlfriend. I don’t know how I managed to go on.”

Pepper blinked. Then she laughed. “She probably didn’t tell you everything.” Of course, outing Captain America’s three-way relationship was something that even Natasha would find too mean. Probably. Or maybe she just wanted to savor the moment later.

“Nah, but I really don’t want to know,” Sam replied.

They sat in silence for a moment. “How is he?”

Pepper swallowed. “Three bullets, one stab wound, took multiple heavy blows to the head. He was unconscious but breathing when I got him here. None of the doctors would comment before they took him to pre-op.”

Sam looked even more tired after hearing that, but he held himself together even so. “Only three bullets? I bet he’ll be up and running circles around all of us in no time.”

“God, I hope so.”

“Excuse me,” one of the hospital attendants said, his voice more than a little nervous. “Are you... ah... the one who brought Toni Stark and Captain America in, ma’am?” His eyes flicked down over the armor, then back up. “It is ma’am, right?”

“Yes to both,” Pepper answered smoothly. “You can call me Rescue.” God, that felt ridiculous, but if she was going to dress like a superhero - be a superhero? - she should probably stick to the script.

“Right.” The nurse seemed to brace himself up and get his nerves together. “I technically can’t disclose patient information to anyone who isn’t family or a fellow medical professional, but I’m going to assume you’re the second until someone tells me different. Captain Rogers is still in surgery, and his baseline biology is so different that it’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen, but he looks... well, better. And Stark is awake, unfortunately.” His expression suggested that the novelty of being able to put Toni on Youtube had already worn out. “She really doesn’t need to be here. There are some minor fractures in her right arm and her ribs needed taping, but otherwise her only real problem is fairly serious dehydration and a lot of bruising. Apparently she was speeding when the helicarriers crashed, so she’s frankly lucky to have gotten off so lightly. We’re pretty swamped for bed space right now, so we’re probably going to discharge her sooner rather than later. Also,” he finished with a slightly rueful smile, “she apparently wants to take you somewhere nice, kiss you, and ‘get you out of those tin clothes.’ Her choice of words. I imagine you get that sort of thing from people you rescue a lot.”

“Yeah,” she laughed, figuring that she got it a lot from Toni, anyway. “Thank you. May I speak with her?”

The nurse looked her up and down in a way that reminded her that she was wearing something that looked like a somewhat-friendly robot from the future, then cleared his throat. “There’s a phone up there. We could put you through, if you want. But we don’t even let people use cell phones past the waiting areas, ma’am.”

Mentally facepalming, Pepper wished that coming down off an adrenaline rush - okay, maybe three or four adrenaline rushes - didn’t make simple logic so difficult.

“Of course, I understand. I just need the number. Thank you.” He gave it to her, and Rescue had a call waiting for her to activate. Pepper walked back to stand next to Sam.

“He’s still in surgery, but looks improved. Toni’s going home soon.”

Sam nodded like it was exactly what he expected, but a tiny relaxation in his posture betrayed his relief. “Good to hear it. You heading out? That,” he nodded up and down the suit, “can’t be comfortable.”

“Not really.” Pepper winced at the memory of Toni teaching her how to make the plumbing connections for the bodysuit, but stuck to gesturing at a teenager with her phone trained on Rescue. “And I’d like to get away from cameras for a while. Are you good?”

He nodded. “Yup. Thanks.”

“It was good to meet you, Sam.”

“You too.”

Getting outside was a little awkward - crossing the cafeteria especially - but she did, and lifted off, and then she could breathe a little better. Rescue put the call through at her signal. The reception was good, but the handset Toni was using was old - she could actually hear a bit of a crackle in the receiver.

“My gallant rescuer, I presume?” Toni sounded tired and stressed, but there was lively and wicked humor in her voice that covered both up pretty effectively. Antonia Stark had always been good at putting up a front.

“Ooh, gallant. I like that.” Pepper smiled tiredly herself. “And how does it feel to be a poster girl for an anti-distracted driving campaign? I think you should do a PSA. Maybe a TV spot.” Virginia Potts could do wicked, too. Especially at 15,000 feet and climbing.

“Youtube video. More likely to go viral.” There was a rasp in Toni’s chuckle, but it sounded genuine. “Just in case the nurse got an attack of Victorian chills and didn’t say so, I can’t wait to find some way to reward you for your help. I know some _great_ places for dinner, and even better ones for after dinner. But even if you say no, tell your boss that he - she? - does great work. There’s totally a business plan in our future. Call me. My people can talk to your people.”

Laughing, Pepper sped towards the DC apartment - fairly bare-bones by Stark standards, but it did have a reinforced balcony and a mysteriously large basement for ‘climate control.’ “Absolutely. It’s a date. But only if you bring your COO. I have a thing about redheads.” Which was not exactly untrue, but tended to be _men_ with red hair. In general. Really.

“Square deal. Just one more thing - I’m sure you have to get back to heroing - but I hear you brought Captain America in as well. Do you know how he’s doing?” Toni was great at controlling her voice, but the concern leaked through anyway. Well, it was Steve Rogers. Every red-blooded American woman (and more than a few men) were bound to take injury to his person as a major tragedy.

Pepper was trying hard not to do the same. “Still in surgery, but the nurse said that he at least looks better.” She’d ask Toni later if she knew any classified information about Steve’s biology. The public knowledge said he healed faster, but wasn’t very specific. “He seemed optimistic.”

“Glad to hear it. Fly safe, Britomart.” A scratchy click, and the line was silent.

“Britomart?” Pepper shook her head. Toni had the strangest sense of humor sometimes.

“Allegorical figure in Spenser’s _The Faerie Queen,_ presented as a knightly embodiment of chastity and virtuous power, probably intended as a representation of Elizabeth the First,” Rescue provided, instantly helpful.

Pepper rolled her eyes. “Thanks. I guess that was almost romantic, coming from Toni.”

“That, or she was trying to make a dirty joke.” Apparently, her digital sister was still struggling with the whole concept of humor. Or just literal minded. God, she hoped it was a programming problem, because the idea that she was ever so cheerfully oblivious was just embarrassing.

“Mm,” Pepper non-committed. The apartment was just ahead. Flying sure beat traffic any day. “About how long should it take them to discharge Toni?” If the answer was longer than fifteen minutes, there was a bath in Pepper’s future. With mineral salts. And candles.

“Officially, at least an hour and a half. With the incentives of keeping Miss Stark around, forty minutes.” Rescue cut thrust to a near-silent minimum, engaged the adaptive camouflage and dropped Pepper neatly down onto the balcony. “I’ll put myself away, shall I?”

“Please.” Various pieces clicked, a faint hiss of depressurisation accompanying the rather bright light of day as Rescue opened, just waiting for Pepper to step out. When she did, she felt heavy, slow, and very, very squishy. If this was how Toni felt every time she left the Aegis, it was no surprise that Pepper sometimes had to bribe her into going out without the suit using candy and booze. Human beings might or might not be meant to fly (or shrug off bullets), but you sure got used to it in a hurry.

Bath. Definitely bath. And the sooner she got the sweat-soaked clinginess of the skinsuit off, the better. Maybe by the time she put on her usual power suit, she’d feel a little less like she was missing her skin.


	6. Chapter 6

A day after Pepper had to cut Toni out of the carrier, they were pretty much still holding hands everywhere. Almost six years after Stane had tried to oust Ms. Stark from her own company, she could afford a little public neediness, and Pepper was taking as as much physical contact as she reasonably could. Almost losing Toni only got harder with each repetition.

On the other hand, now that she could finally do something about it, the awful feeling of complete helplessness was gone. Not to mention the sheer awesomeness of being a super hero. So Pepper was less sunshine and unicorns and more mildly-injured dragon slayer.

Of course, not all the dragons were down yet.

“How long do you think he’s going to be unconscious?”

“Depends on how bad the head injuries were. His body’s almost certainly dealt with all the internal bleeding by now, but Erskine’s notes on the formula’s effects on the brain were pretty speculative. They didn’t know much about neuroscience back then.” Eyes closed, Toni was curled across a hospital chair and Pepper’s lap with one hand wrapped around Pepper’s and the other knotted in Steve’s blankets. Periodically, she’d mumble something under her breath that Pepper only half understood. Now, for instance. “JARVIS, try adjusting the alloy mix for another .05 of iridium and tell me how the kinetic curves work.”

As far as she knew, Toni hadn’t implanted a wireless mic and speaker into her own head. So either there was some other tiny receiver somewhere on Toni’s person, or she was just thinking out loud. Probably.

“What do you think?” Pepper yawned. Even after a long night’s sleep, she was still wrung out from the Triskelion catastrophe. “Since you probably know more neuroscience than he did.”

“Ish. I’m only an expert since yesterday.” Toni yawned, too, showing off her delicate white teeth. “But I think he’s going to come out of it as soon as his body decides it’s fixed all the physical damage to his brain and not before. I’m pretty sure it is going to fix all of it, though. He might have some minor memory loss or temporary sensory weirdness, but he’s going to be a hundred percent. That serum really makes everything we’ve tried with stimulated self-repair in the last seventy years look like amateur hour. You know my dad spent years and years trying to reconstruct Erskine’s work? He was right next to him for half the process, had almost all his notes and still couldn’t produce something really useable. Personally, I think it was a Hieronymus machine.”

Busy threading her long fingers through Toni’s hair, Pepper paused to lightly tap the engineer on the nose. “Which is?”

“Huh?” Toni blinked. “Oh, right. Art history minor. It’s a bunch of junk in a box that just happens to work exactly the way the designer intends it to.”

Too tired to get a good eyebrow raise, Pepper blinked. “That sounds a lot like calling it magic.”

“Not magic. Probability. If enough people throw enough stuff into enough boxes and shake them enough ways, eventually you get a machine that does the thing you’re trying to do.” Toni shifted her head to nuzzle Pepper’s wrist lightly. “Plus, sometimes, the universe seems to throw an extra break to the brilliant and iron-willed. So a particularly determined monkey with a particularly cooperative typewriter later, you have Shakespeare.”

“Did you just call Steve a typewriter? Or a monkey?”

“Actually, I called my dad and Erskine monkeys and the Vita-Ray a typewriter and Steve the works of Shakespeare, to which he is far superior. They’ve never once carried me in out of a rainstorm,” Toni sniped.

Pepper grinned. “I’m going to tell him you said that. Actually, I might tell everyone you said that. Toni Stark waxing poetic.”

“Nobody will believe you. I have a carefully cultivated reputation for being totally lacking in romance.” Toni nipped her wrist again, then sighed. “Damn. All right, try twice that iridium increase and see where we can pinch off the poundage.” She caught Pepper looking at her and grinned crookedly. “Simulations take time to run. I can multitask.”

Hand pausing, Pepper’s voice took on the deceptively mild tone that signalled impending doom if she didn’t get the answer she was looking for. “How can JARVIS hear you, Toni?”

The engineer wiggled her left wrist slightly. The silver charm bracelet on it jangled. “Omni-directional microphone and encrypted wi-fi/sat-link.”

Pepper’s hand started moving again, but slower than before. “Okay. And how are you hearing JARVIS?”

“I’m not.” Toni blinked her eyes twice, and they seemed to glow faintly for a second or two. “Contacts. Sergey Brin can kiss my exquisitely toned ass.”

Closing her eyes, Pepper massaged her own temples for a moment. “I am sitting bedside vigil over a ninety-five-year-old super-soldier with my girlfriend who I periodically have to check for experimental tech implants. My life. God.”

“Hey!” Toni objected, half-seriously. “I haven’t implanted anything in myself since the last lockchip update. That’s over a year ago. Ancient history.”

“I love you,” Pepper almost sighed.

“I know.” Toni twisted around until she was straddling Pepper’s lap in the semi-comfortable hospital chair and wrapped her arms around Pepper’s shoulders. The kiss started slow, but there were definitely fireworks involved. When it was over, Toni nuzzled her throat and husked against her in a way that conducted itself through the bone of her jaw to her ear. “I’m a lucky woman that way.”

“Damn right,” the redhead grinned, desire and exhaustion combining to make her feel really, really drunk. “What time is it?”

“We don’t have time to have sex on Steve’s bed without what’s-his-name walking in on us, no, but I’m pretty sure Steve wouldn’t wake up. And even if he did, he’d understand.”

“No. Sam. Ick. He won’t have the chance because see answer number one.”

Toni heaved an exaggerated sigh. “See? This is why we need Steve back. He’d totally let me have sex on his hospital bed.”

Pepper snorted. “No, the correct analogy is would he let you have sex on my hospital bed?”

“If you were in that hospital bed,” Antonia Stark said, “I’d either be ripping apart a SHIELD base somewhere looking for their best classified medicine or incapable of thinking about anything but when you were going to open your eyes.”

Brushing a wisp of dark hair away from one of the most beautiful, insufferable faces in the world, Pepper smiled softly. “Pretty much the same for me if it were you,” she agreed. “Though more sneaking, less property damage.”

“Soft touch.” Toni kissed her again, delicately this time. “I dreamed about the desert last night. Funny thing happened - you showed up to carry me home. Flew me all the way back.”

Tired as she was, Pepper still managed a proper bear-hug, tears stinging the corners of her eyes. “You know I would.”

“I know.” Toni kissed the tears away from the corner of one eye, then suddenly chuckled. It was her back-on-stage chuckle. “Hey, look. Someone’s caught us making out again. Too bad he doesn’t appreciate the view.”

“You know how it is. Opportunities wasted on the ungrateful,” Sam Wilson quipped, bag over his shoulder. “Somewhere, some fanboy is crying his heart out.”

Wiping her eyes with an only slightly-exaggerated yawn, Pepper smiled and extended a hand. “Pepper Potts. I’d stand, but there appears to be a crazy engineer in my lap.”

“We met this morning, but I think I was pretty much non-verbal. Sam Wilson. Nice meeting you.” He gave her a firm handshake and a probing look. “Gotta say I have to admire your guts. Takes something to make out with Captain America’s girlfriend when he might wake up any time.”

“It does,” Toni agreed, “but lack of _chutzpah_ has never really been my problem.”

Maybe it was that the previous day had taken a toll on everyone, because Sam’s reactions were slow enough to watch. Pepper kind of wanted popcorn to munch as the Falcon pilot looked at Pepper, then Toni, then Toni’s hand that had made it back to Steve’s blankets, and Pepper’s feet propped up on the foot of Captain Roger’s bed. Then his eyebrows took up residence somewhere near his hairline.

Proud of herself from hiding her enjoyment of his surprise, Pepper smiled with a ‘what can you do’ quality to it that was companionable rather than mocking. “Would you like me to send you the Excel chart or just go with ‘it’s complicated’?”

“If I say I’m going to get Natasha for this, how far back in line am I starting?” he replied plaintively. “I thought it was bad enough when she sprung the whole ‘Toni Stark is his girlfriend’ thing on me.”

“Oh, Pepper’s his girlfriend. I’m just his patroness, tech goddess and personal fuckpuppet,” Toni off-handed so casually that poor Sam actually did a double-take.

Pepper made a face. “Ugh. Really? That’s a terrible word and you are banned from ever speaking it again.”

“Plaything? Fuckslut? Sex toy? Simpering, masochistic, tame bitch?” Toni tilted her head mock-innocently. “Do you have a preference?”

Sam gave Pepper a look that encompassed everything from ‘You’re a saint for putting up with this’ to ‘You actually stay with this woman by choice?’ Then he turned to Steve’s happily unaware form and gave him much the same treatment, with a good measure of ‘I can totally take point on this if you need to break up.’

Meanwhile, Pepper was leaning back with a hand over her eyes. “Shut. Up. I hate you. We are going home.”  

Toni put on her best simpering club voice, just to rub it in. “Whatever you say, Miss Potts. _Whatever_ you say.”

Gently shoving her brat of a girlfriend out of her lap, Pepper stood and stretched. “Ready to settle in, Sam? The nurse has our number. We’d be very grateful if you’d keep us updated.”

“I got it.” Sam took out an iPod and fitted it to the music dock, then took a seat in the chair Pepper hadn’t been using. He smiled lopsidedly. “I’ll call. Just don’t let her pick up the phone, okay?”

“Awwww.” Toni sighed disappointedly. “I don’t think he likes me, Fairest.”

“Good,” Pepper rejoined, gathering up her things. “Your ego doesn’t need to be any bigger.”

Once they had everything, Rescue’s pilot smiled back at Falcon’s. “It was good to meet you, Sam.”

“Nice meeting you.” He shook his head, a little, mouth quirking up at the corner, then tried to get comfortable. Toni doubled back, kissed Steve on the forehead and then came trotting up behind Pepper as they passed the nurse’s station. The engineer stole her coat off Pepper’s arm, tucked herself into it, then smirked with positively indecent cheer.

“Why did you do that, anyway?” Pepper gave her a tired, narrow-eyed look.

Toni just smirked even more. “Imagine the look on Steve’s face when the guy finally gets up the nerve to ask him about it.”

Despite her better judgement, Pepper laughed. “Good point. But I still can’t un-hear the unspeakable word. You owe me for that. Sam, too, but he’ll probably take his payment in time away from you.”

“Nobody ever picks the fun ways for me to pay them back,” Toni sighed, rolling her eyes ostentatiously.

“Rio. Carnaval. Cintia and Erico.”

“Touche. Fair point. Maybe ‘ever’ was a little strong.” Toni lounged against the inside of the elevator, eyes half-lidded, then stiffened abruptly and jammed her arm into the door to keep it from closing. She practically shoved her way through the gap between the door and the frame before it even finished opening, and then she was running down the hallway toward Steve’s room.

Pepper’s phone started to ring.

“Incoming,” she warned Sam, returning to Steve’s room at a more sedate pace.

“Incoming what?” he started to follow-up, and then she heard the door slam open down the hallway and the pilot mutter “Fucking hell” under his breath. “Right. Never mind.”

“See you soon. Just don’t make any sudden movements and she probably won’t even notice you.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem.”

The phone slid home in her back just as she gave an apologetic smile to the nurse and opened Steve’s door again. Toni was on the bed with Steve, more or less flat on top of him, and mixing a very loud rant about personal safety with kissing in a way that made both more or less incoherent. But Pepper definitely caught “blowing things up while you’re on them” and “kick your big, blond, impossibly perfect ass” mixed in there.

“You did what?” A hand on Toni’s shoulder, Pepper interjected with sharp authority. Stitched, bruised and bloody, Steve’s face was still managing a combination of tired irritation and stoic nobility. At the moment, she could see why he sometimes annoyed Toni so much.

Toni stopped kissing him long enough to manage a really good glare. “Captain I-only-regret-that-I-have-but-one-life-to-give-etcetera here told Maria Hill to have the helicarriers start blowing each other up _while he was still on them._ ”

Steve took a deep, careful breath, and let it out slowly. He didn’t shy away from Pepper’s horrified expression, just met her eyes steadily with the quiet solidity of the truly righteous. “Waiting would have been too big a risk. I’m sorry for upsetting you - both of you - but I’d do it again if I had to.”

Shaking her head, too many conflicting feelings to act on any one of them, Pepper grimaced and put a hand on his shoulder between the bandages. “You’re something else, Steve Rogers.”

“‘Something else’, my ass. They have a name for this, Steve. It’s called a death wish. You people had me go to therapy for one, remember?” Toni kissed him to stop him from interrupting, which was maybe not the soundest plan, but she didn’t seem to care. “No. Once is heroics. Twice is a problem. You are getting psychological help immediately or I swear I won’t let you into Pepper’s bed for a year. I will engineer you a little Cap-ball to roll around in that will keep you out of trouble. You following me, Rogers?”

“My bed?” Pepper’s tone was acidic.

“Well, we both know I don’t have that kind of willpower so that’d just be an idle threat and.... oh. Um. Overstepping and proprietary overreach. Right. Fuck. Sorry.” Toni flushed. “Can you glare at me later? I’m trying to browbeat Steve into taking better care of himself now.”

That particular bundle of rage put away for later, Pepper let out a breath herself. “Yes. There will definitely be a later.” Her next breath was somewhat less furious. “And while browbeating is rarely an effective motivator for self-care, she is right that you need it, Steve. You’ve got a lot that’s overdue for getting looked at.”

Righteousness starting to waver, Steve suddenly looked like the twenty-five-year-old he effectively was. “It’s not that simple. Not exactly a lot of people trained to deal with my situation. Pschology--”

“Bullshit.” Sam uncrossed his arms to jab a finger in Steve’s direction. “Time-travel and superpowers don’t change your basic problems. A home you can’t go back to? Friends drastically changed by war? Trouble relating to people? You ain’t got nothing the average VA therapist hasn’t seen a dozen times.”

“Not to mention,” Toni put in, her voice a little milder now, “that headshrinkers have come a long way since the dark ages.”

For a moment Steve looked like he was going to fight - jaw set, eyes narrowed - but after sizing up each of them in turn, he closed his eyes and sighed. This particular surrender made him look both peaceful and defeated.

“Okay.”

With that, Pepper’s hand became softer on Steve’s arm, Toni’s position seemed more cat-like and less pro-wrestler, and Sam just nodded and leaned back. “I have a few names in mind. We can hash out the details later.”

For a minute, nobody said anything. Sam and Pepper each practiced their zen. Toni nuzzled into Steve’s uninjured shoulder and wouldn’t let go. And Steve....

Well, pretty much all of them could hear Steve thinking, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you rushed. If Captain America wanted to take his time saying something, he took his damn time.

“How did I get here? Last thing I remember is falling into the river.”

Pepper frowned.

“Aegis and Rescue found you up on the shore. Rescue brought you in.” Toni kissed his jaw lightly. “You were pretty smashed up.”

“Also stabbed, half-drowned, and shot three times,” Sam commented serenely.

“You didn’t swim to shore?” Pepper frowned. Even without the protective gear and shield - where was that thing, anyway? - Steve’s muscles were enough to send him straight to the bottom of the Potomac. “Or maybe you did but can’t remember.”

Oddly, Steve had begun to smile. “Don’t think so.”

“Steve,” Toni murmured, her voice suddenly very still and very intent, “you’ve got that look on your face again.”

He stayed zoned out for a moment, and then frowned. “Who or what is Rescue?”

“Aegis got herself a sidekick,” Sam explained while Toni and Pepper were still trading looks. “Kinda like the Red Cross in a flying tank, I guess. Met her earlier. She was hanging around reading National Geographic in the lobby for a while. Seemed all right.”

Meanwhile, Steve was looking from Toni to Pepper and back. Toni started playing with the sheets in the fidgety way she did when she was edgy. “Sam,” she said, putting a lecherous vibe in her voice that was probably more convincing if you weren’t someone she spent a large fraction of her time hitting on, “you mind taking a walk? If Captain Rogers here isn’t too busy being held together with string, I want to get reacquainted.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Please, it takes more than that to scare me off, Stark. Besides, Cap already told me that you do more than build that thing.”

Antonia Stark could be warm, funny, snarky, crude, distant or intensely passionate by turns, but most people knew that about her. JARVIS had at one point calculated there were more Youtube videos about Antonia Stark than on any other single subject that wasn’t cute pets, stupid behavior or superheroes (though at least some of each of those categories involved Antonia, too). The look she gave first Sam and then Steve at that moment, though - that was something nobody except Pepper or maybe Rhodey had ever seen there more than once: the cold, hard, merciless look that made it hard to believe anyone _didn’t_ know that the Aegis and its pilot were inseparable extensions of each other.

“Toni,” Steve said softly. Just her name, but it was the way he said it that mattered. Warning and gentle and firm all at once. Pepper was already getting her arms around their engineer when he said it. Toni struggled with the embrace for a minute, eyes still flat and blazing, and then slowly stopped. Breathed. Steve’s hands, bandaged and stitched up or not, brushed over her hips like he was trying to settle a wild animal.

Breathing hard, Toni sat there and didn’t do anything. Pepper pressed her face into the soft darkness of Toni’s hair, nuzzling at the pulse hammering in the engineer’s neck, and the part of her that wasn’t clenched tight with concern wondered - not for the first time - at how strange it was to be proud of someone for doing nothing.

The muscles in Toni’s arms started to relax, an inch at a time. Across the room, so did Sam, whose expression suggested he was trying to convince his own combat trauma that he wasn’t in a room with a potentially explosive bomb. Pepper would spare attention to be worried about and angry with him later. Right now, she had higher priorities.

Steve managed to restrain himself from saying anything else yet. That had taken a lot of practice. When Steve wasn’t restricting himself to manly brooding, he had a tendency to keep trying to talk someone down whether it was helping or not. When he was what Toni was angry about - or part of it, anyway - that was counterproductive in the extreme.

Fortunately, Steve knew how to learn and follow protocol.

She could hear it when Toni’s jaw unclenched. “Deflagged,” Toni whispered, eyes shut tight. “Definitely still some unexploded ordnance, but safe to travel.”

Relaxing her hold, Pepper started rubbing circles on Toni’s arm. “That’s my girl,” she murmured softly, and “I love you” and “I’ve got you” but not “it’s going to be okay,” however much she wanted to say it. However much she wanted Toni to believe it.

“Steve,” Toni whispered, very softly and very carefully, like even his name was potentially explosive.

He brought a slow, careful hand to her shoulder. “Toni.” This time, there was relief, and reassurance, and even a little apology in his tone.

“Not. Fucking. Cool,” she breathed.

“No, it wasn’t. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes cracked open a little. “I know you have the whole Band of Brothers thing going on, but when you decide who I trust for me, I want to start doing crazy supervillain things involving orbital death lasers and total surveillance systems. We’ve talked about that.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, which sounded an awful lot like “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Apparently, Pepper wasn’t the only one who thought so. “I do that a lot,” Toni said, cracking just a hint of a smile. “Didn’t I tell you _not_ to follow my example?”

His battered lips quirked up at the corner. “Guess you’re a bad influence.”

“Probably.” She leaned down and rested her head against his, whispering in his ear, and Pepper caught the words “suit” and “meant to tell you” and “really hot.” Which probably meant Toni was apologizing for surprising him with the Rescue thing. That, or she was trying to patch things up with sex, which was a pretty stock Toni behavior.

The half-impressed, half-shocked look Steve gave Pepper when Toni pulled back still didn’t clarify anything.

Sam cleared his throat.

“I still haven’t decided not to take you up to 40,000 and drop you, Wilson,” Toni almost sighed. “But I guess it’s not really your fault that our boyfriend is a complete dinosaur.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Sorry to drop it on you like that. Are you always this crazy?”

“Plural or singular?” Toni chuckled faintly. “Either way, only on our good days.”

The other eyebrow went up to join the first. “Lord, save us.”

“Amen to that.” Pepper smiled. “And praise the good therapists of the world.”

Toni turned her head enough to kiss Pepper gently, then crooked a real smile - wry, resigned, but real and alive. “Is that your way of telling me that I’m behind on my appointment schedule, Miss Potts?”

The redhead affected an innocent look. “Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed that you were.”

Steve snorted. Toni rolled her eyes. Even Sam smothered a laugh.

Pepper suddenly became very interested in the medical equipment monitoring Steve.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Toni murmured as she leaned in to kiss Pepper gently on the mouth. “We all know we’d be lost if you weren’t totally omniscient, so we won’t tell anyone that it’s your superpower.”


	7. Chapter 7

“My poor angel,” Antonia Stark crooned gently as she reached for a spanner wrench. “What did she do to you?”

“I’m still here,” Pepper reminded her. “And if you’d rather I don’t save your ass next time and keep the paint job pretty, all you have to do is ask.”

“Getting the pollutants from the river cleared out was not, I admit, the easiest thing. Corrosion is a bitch. But no, that wasn’t the part you ought to feel bad about.” Toni finished the last set of bolts holding Rescue’s chestplate together and lifted the armor clear of its stabilized mountings, exposing the shock-stabilized machinery underneath. “When I said you could probably lift a cruiseliner slowly, did you hear ‘please, Pepper, test the electromagnetic rig way past its benchmarks’? Because I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what I was trying to tell you.”

Rescue’s pilot quirked a half-smile at Toni’s back. “Okay, sure, I repent. Even though it was both necessary and, if I do say so myself, pretty awesome. And even though I know you love testing equipment past the benchmarks.”

Toni let the spanner wobble in her hand in a gesture that was probably incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t know her as well as Pepper did. To Pepper, it said ‘all true, but I don’t want to admit it because I’m not done busting you yet.’

Leaning forward to rest her cheek on Toni’s shoulder, arms wrapped around the smaller woman’s waist, Pepper relented. “I am very grateful to have her taken care of. It was so sad to hear that whine in her servos; I think JARVIS was trying to pretend it wasn’t as bad as it was.”

“Mmmm.” She could feel the heat of Toni’s back through her grease-smeared tanktop, smell the hint of sweat and machine oil and the cleaning agent specially developed for Aegis, the way Toni’s muscles moved and shifted under her cheek while the engineer pulled and replaced burnt-out circuits and tested hydraulics. “I guess it could have been worse. You could still fly her without much trouble, and the waterproofing held up to the Potomac.”

“Of course it did,” Pepper remarked while getting an excellent view of Toni’s dirty, capable hands working the insides of the suit. Her own hands slipped down to settle on Toni’s hips. “You built it.”

Toni’s voice dropped down into a timbre that was usual reserved for their early-morning bedroom activities - the ones that followed Toni shaking Pepper out of some perfectly valuable sleep and then making her forget to be annoyed about it. “I haven’t had time for more than a first read of the datacache from DC, but I’ve got some ideas for improvements I wanted to run by you once I’ve got a chance to build the computer models. Give me a week and I’ll have something to show you I think you’ll like.”

“Ooh, improvements.” Squeezing her girlfriend’s hips, Pepper pressed her lips to the place between Toni’s jaw and her ear. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Pepper Potts,” Toni breathed, “are you trying to distract me from working on your suit?”

“Distract you?” Pepper asked sultrily, letting her hands drift down the Carhartts. “Hmm,” she mused, taking the time to thoroughly fondle the most expensively-armored ass in the world, “No, not today. Don’t let me keep you.” With a final pat and kiss, she stepped back, making for the elevator. Toni’s laughter chased her the whole way to the kitchen two floors up, even if she couldn’t hear it.

Steve was rummaging through the freezer, moving with almost as much easy power as he had before the attacks. If two days was all it took to get him from nearly dead to almost perfect health, Pepper could see why so many people had tried to replicate Erkine’s serum, Harlem incidents or not.

“Morning,” he called over his shoulder. “I’m making breakfast. You like bacon?”

Technically, Pepper’s little notebook said that she was off breakfast meats for the rest of the week. But Steve cooking bacon over the stove was too tempting to pass up. “Please.”

He stood in front of the freezer for another minute before shrugging and pulling out a package. “Is, uh, ‘maple hickory’ okay? The future has too many choices.”

“Maple hickory’s fine. You don’t like options?” She went to the fridge and poured herself a raw cold press blueberry-pomegranate-acai juice blend, then came back to the kitchen bar and settled down to watch him prep the pan and warm the stove.

“Options are fine.” Once the bacon decision had been made, the rest of his work was at least partially on auto-pilot. It wasn’t the first time he’d cooked for Pepper. “But I’m used to, maybe, two or three. Easy to decide. Not ten or twenty. Did someone somewhere decide that they needed thick-cut pepper bacon but couldn’t put up with thin-cut pepper bacon? And why can’t people just add their own seasonings anyway?”

“It saves time and means most people don’t need a spice rack.” Pepper’s lips quirked up in a little grin. “Which we’d never have properly filled without JARVIS, most likely. And sometimes I’m only in the mood for thick cut bacon.”

He gave her a wry smile. “Stop. Your patient explanations mess up my old-man complaining, Pepper.”

“Mmm.” Pepper gave it a minute or two, then adopted her best scratchy elder voice. “‘In my day, we ate our gruel and we thought we were lucky if we got a little salt for it. Lucky!’”

“Do you want bacon or not?”

“I really, really do.” To forestall the urge to tease him at length, Pepper opened her tablet’s case and checked the morning papers and stock reports. HYDRA, SHIELD and Captain America were still all over the front pages. Stark Industries was a couple of pages back in the business section of most of the major papers, marketing their new green competitor to Google’s self-driving cars and taking steps to offer commercial spacelaunch services at a revolutionarily low price. Well, it didn’t exactly have the same sizzle as scandal and helicarriers being fished out of the Potomac. She made a note to re-publicize it once the furor had died down.

“JARVIS showed me footage. That was some good work you did with the helicarrier,” he remarked in that stoic, well-done-ma’am tone of voice he usually reserved for newsreels. “With Toni in the water, nobody else could have done it.”

Pepper’s fingers stopped. For a second or two, she just stared at the carefully manicured tips of them and tried to decide what to do with the flood of emotion trying to smother her voice. The urge to look over her shoulder to see who he was talking to was battling with pride and joy and a frankly embarrassing fangirlish glee at being an honest-to-god heroine who’d just gotten an ‘attagirl’ from Captain America. “Ah. Thank you.”

“Speaking as her engineer, the Aegis couldn’t have done that trick on my best day.” Toni wandered in, still smelling of machine oil and cleaning solution and burnt plastic, and grabbed a beer from the fridge, popping it open on the counter. “Rescue’s built for heavy lift and recovery - Aegis doesn’t have the electromagnetic arrays or the space to mount them. Which bacon is that?”

“Maple hickory,” Steve said with a remarkably straight face.

Toni took a long pull from the beer, then peered over his shoulder. “Thick or thin cut?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” He flipped a few pieces. “If you want a different kind, have JARVIS make it.”

“You make it better.” Toni brushed a kiss against the back of his neck. “How was therapy?”

Steve shrugged. “I don’t really know how it’s supposed to be. She seems to know what she’s talking about. We didn’t really get very far.”

“Did you actually talk? I understand these things work better if you don’t just sit there silently and grunt occasionally.” Totally relentless and without tact. Classic Toni.

Knowing this, Steve just rolled his eyes. “Yes, Toni, we talked. She said I’m one of her more treatable cases, all things considered.”

“Feel free not to tell Toni anything else,” Pepper said. “Totally not her business.”

Toni shot Pepper a ‘whose side are you on, anyway?’ look and sniffed. “The mental health of my boyfriend is none of my business, Miss Potts?”

“Generally, speaking, yes,” Pepper granted. “I will even join you in ensuring he makes his appointments. However, what happens during therapy? Not our business unless he feels like telling us.”

He didn’t say anything, but a subtle tension left Steve’s shoulders. Toni took another slug of her beer, pouted, then peered over his shoulder at the bacon again. Finally, not without a little revenge calculated in, she conceded. “Fine. I need to shower anyway.”

“Aww,” the redhead pouted back. Post-workshop Toni had alway been one of her favorites. “Fine. I guess I’ll just have to turn to Steve for comfort.”

Dishing up the bacon, the man in question held up a hand. “Wait, what just happened and why am I involved?”

“Mysterious ways, Rogers.” Toni smirked. “Mysterious ways.”

“That’s God, Toni. I’m pretty sure He doesn’t need three of every meat product known to man.” Only the barest hint of a smirk showed on Steve’s face. Pepper laughed and Toni knocked back the rest of her beer in a long pull before folding her arms and narrowing her eyes at America's first and only real supersoldier.

“Rogers,” she said menacingly, “I know how to tell your fan club where to find you.”

“JARVIS told me how to put videos on YouTube,” he countered, breaking eggs into a mixing bowl. “I have one of you being really cute in your sleep.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Nonchalantly, he started whisking the eggs. “You willing to bank on that?”

Meanwhile, Pepper rested her chin on folded hands, watching the two Avengers with her teeth in her lip.

Toni thought about it long enough that the swing of the empty beer bottle between her fingers was starting to take on a metronymic quality. Then she grinned, a hungry expression that reminded Pepper of the metal of the Aegis’s frame. “I’m going upstairs to shower, and then coming down to eat. And then you’re both coming to bed with me if I have to order JARVIS to seal the building and track you both down the corridors.”

She turned and went out, humming softly to herself, and left the beer bottle on the small platform by the wall multifunction display. Pepper stood, slid the platter of bacon into the oven and set it to warm, and nodded to Steve while her fingers played on the neck and mouth of Toni’s discarded bottle. “Put that in the fridge when you’re done with it. We can eat later.”

After a few more seconds, Steve remembered to start whisking again.


	8. Chapter 8

“Speaking as an expert, Rogers, if you want to sneak out unseen in the morning you need to get an earlier start.”

Sighing, Steve put the t-shirt he was holding into the backpack on top of the other clothes he’d packed. “JARVIS, I thought the cameras were off.”

“I am afraid that Ms. Stark reactivated them, Captain Rogers. She is my primary programmer,” the AI said, tone positively sympathetic.

Toni, wearing a battered Stark Industries t-shirt and boxer shorts while she sipped what was obviously fresh coffee from one of Pepper’s abstract art mugs, just leaned in the doorway with practiced immobility. _I am not leaving until we talk,_ her shoulders said.

He stood, perfectly still and glaring with jaw set, like a statue of some angry Greek god. It could have been thirty seconds, or it could have been five minutes. Neither of them budged.

“Bucky pulled me out of the river,” he finally said. “I’m going to find him.”

“James Buchanan Barnes, born March 10 of 1917, Brooklyn Hospital. Not a lot of paper on him until he joins the Army in January of ‘42, but what there is says a working class family with prospects to me. Did well in his initial training, made Sergeant before his unit - the 107th - shipped out for Europe. His service record’s listed as classified, but ironically enough, nobody’s revoked my SHIELD consultant credentials yet so...”

“Are you done?” Steve snapped. “You don’t need to tell me who he is.” Stalking into the adjoining bathroom, he grabbed the travel kit he’d brought from his Brooklyn apartment. That went into the backpack, too.

“My point,” Toni said, unruffled by his anger in the infuriating way she had of calming down once she had a problem in her teeth, “is that I know who he is, Steve. That I found out more about him in the last four days than you probably know. I’ve got a stack of hard drives on Hydra, the Red Room, KGB/Hydra links, super-soldier experiments. You want to find him, fine. Okay. We can do that. But you don’t have to sneak off in not-sufficiently-the-middle-of-the-night to do it.”

His mouth opened, then closed again. He frowned. This was not how he’d expected this conversation to go. “You’d help me?”

“You’re joking.” Her eyebrow went up, and then she was weighing her cup of coffee in one hand like she was thinking about throwing it at him. “You’re _not_ joking. Steven Rogers, if you think for a second that I’m going to do anything _but_ help you whether you let me or not, you are an even more unbelievable idiot than I thought you were before. Which, believe me, was pretty fucking unbelievable.”

For a few long seconds he just stared, and then he chuckled. “You know, anybody in their right mind would refuse to help track down the mentally unstable assassin who almost killed me, Sam and Natasha last week. But I guess I just forgot how crazy you are, Stark.”

“Idiot,” she said, and then drained the coffee from the mug in a long, deliberate swallow. Then she did throw it at him, not that it was any trouble to catch.

By the time he had, she’d practically wrapped herself around him.

The mug wound up on the dresser, somehow, and Steve put his big arms around Toni’s waist and shoulders. “Sorry I’m such a numbskull sometimes.”

“Maybe I ought to figure out a way to upgrade you,” she muttered into his chest. “Obviously Eriskine missed some things.”

He snorted. “Nah, you’d just make it worse. Buck always said I was too dumb to know when to quit.”

“Why do I like that about you, again?”

She was smiling when he tucked his hand under her jaw and made her look up at him - one of those wry, battered smiles that made her look older than she was, like the wear and tear on the metal of the Aegis was something she carried on the inside.

“‘Cause you’re nuts,” he murmured, and kissed her.

That lasted a little while. Long enough that when she broke it and whispered into his mouth, he was expecting something sweet or maybe blush-inducingly nasty. What he got hit him in the guts instead, harder than she could possibly have managed with her hands.

“Nothing in the files said you were in love with him.”

He sucked in a breath around the pain, holding her at arm’s length. She was watching him with quiet, unreadable eyes and the faint little smile on her lips that always made him feel like he’d left his skin somewhere else, and he turned away to face the window.

“Nobody knew.”

The weight of her pressed against his back, her arms slipping around his waist, and her voice was so quiet that he probably wouldn’t have heard it without the serum’s enhancements to his ears. “That must have sucked.”

His breath left in a half-laugh, half-sigh. “Yeah, it did.” He tuned a half-smile back at her. “That was one of the biggest ironies of my life, you know. Waking up alone in a queer paradise.”

“Well, you get his brains unscrambled and I’ll figure out a way to plate that arm of his in white gold for the wedding.” He could hear pain in Toni’s voice when she said it, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t serious.

“You do the Aegis in gold, we can have a double wedding,” he smiled. “The four of us. Bucky and Pepper would get along great. Not sure about him and you, though.”

“We’d get along fine,” she assured him in the voice she used when she was explaining that SHIELD bureaucrats were going to go along with the plan if they knew what was good for them.

“If you say so,” he grinned. She laughed, battled him in the shoulder lightly, then sobered up when she got a good look at his eyes.

“Steve,” she said, voice almost a warning, “are you still thinking about going without me?”

“Only a little,” he conceded, ducking his head. “There’s going to be a lot of boring recon, anyway. I can call you when things look more interesting. You’re supposed to be busy with other things too, if I recall Pepper’s most recent complaints.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Now you’re talking sense,” she muttered, shaping the word as if it were unfit for speech. “You’ve been spending too much time with Pepper.”

“Has he, now?” The redhead’s laugh carried in from the hallway. “If that’s how it worked, I’d never let you out of my sight, Toni.”

“It still wouldn’t help,” Toni assured her, smile turning crooked. “I’m incorrigible, remember?”

“Mm,” Pepper said, bending to kiss her girlfriend. She was still barefoot in sleep shorts with an oversized t-shirt hanging off one shoulder and her hair flowing loose. “Morning, Steve.” She saw the backpack, took in her lovers’ body language, and raised an eyebrow. “This is going to be interesting.”

“Steve is running away to find his long-lost boyfriend,” Toni explained, gesturing as though she was writing on an imaginary whiteboard, “and he thought we’d try to stop him but is incompetent at sneaking out. So now he’s trying to convince me I shouldn’t go along and keep him out of trouble, which is clearly a lost cause.”

Pepper’s eyes darted back and forth between Toni and Steve, and then her eyebrows tried to climb all the way into her hair. “Wait, you mean you and Barnes were... _oh._ Oh wow. That sucks. I’m so sorry, Steve,” she said, and hugged him.

“We did that part already,” Toni said in what was either genuine impatience or a really good imitation.

“No, we didn’t,” Pepper answered. “My hugs are special.”

“No argument here,” Steve grinned over her shoulder.

Toni heaved a long sigh. “We still haven’t scientifically established that because you won’t let me bring in a control group or a statistically valid sample size. But I’ll admit the anecdotal evidence is strong. ”

“Special,” Pepper repeated. “Now,” she continued, still wrapped around Steve, “you two are incapable of avoiding trouble, and yet the kinds of trouble you create are different enough that I think she should go with you, Steve. You’ll have each other in a pinch and, if shit really hits the fan, you can call me for backup.”

“Damn,” Steve sighed.

“Road trip,” Toni said, grinning with indecent cheer. “I’ll pack the Lamborghini.”

“No,” Steve and Pepper said simultaneously.

“The Tesla?” Toni ventured, affecting a pout.

“I guess you can drive what you want,” Steve shrugged. “I’ll take my Triumph.”

Now Toni turned the pout on Pepper, hands on her hips. “Why do I get glared at for taking a high performance car while he’s riding the antique motorcycle?”

“Remember your last road trip?” Pepper asked, unrelenting.

“First of all, that wasn’t my fault, and secondly, the insurance covered it! Not to mention.....”


End file.
